"I think we should be wise to drop it," Aaron declared earnestly. "We are off the rocks now, Harvey. I am content with what I've got." "That's how I'm feeling," the other assented, "and yet there's this last necklace. It seems rather playing it low-down on Brinnen not to get rid of that for him. You see, unless it's broken up quickly, it's more dangerous stuff to handle than the others." "Why?" Aaron demanded. "Don't be foolish," Harvey Grimm admonished, a little impatiently. "There's the hotel where it was stolen, right in front of you. Here am I with the necklace, a hundred yards away. There's Brinnen on the same floor. There's Madame de Borria--why, it's a dare-devil piece of work, anyway." "You don't mean that it's Madame de Borria's necklace you've got?" Aaron Rodd groaned. "Of course it is!" Harvey Grimm replied, a little testily. "You saw it yesterday, didn't you? There it is in my overcoat pocket, the pocket nearest you, at the present moment." Aaron Rodd paused abruptly before a bench and sat down. It was quite close to where he had first seen Henriette. "Look here," he said, "for God's sake, Harvey, jump into a taxi at Charing-Cross there and take the thing off somewhere." "Take it off?" was the grim response. "I'd give a cool hundred to be rid of it at this minute. The trouble is that if I make a single move in the direction of any of my haunts, the whole thing will be blown upon." "You mean that you are being followed?" "Brodie hasn't been fifty yards away from me since nine o'clock," Harvey Grimm muttered. "Madame de Borria saw him yesterday, just after the theft, and he persuaded her to put the matter into his hands. See that window--the end one but three on the top storey but two?" Aaron looked up to where the spotless white front of the Milan gleamed through the budding trees. "I see it," he admitted. "That is the window of Madame de Borria. Now count five windows to the left and one down--that is my room. Now up again, and two on to the right, and you come to the apartments of Captain Brinnen, known to Paul Brodie as the redoubtable Jeremiah Sands. When you add to these geographical coincidences the fact that the necklace is at the present moment in my pocket, and that I can't move a yard without being followed, you will understand that one needs all one's wits this morning. We are getting just a little near the bone." "Nearer than you imagine, perhaps," Aaron Rodd whispered. "Here's Brodie." Harvey Grimm was, for a moment, curiously still. His frame seemed to have stiffened into a sort of rigid attention. One felt that his brain was working with the same concentrated force. He neither moved nor looked in the direction which his companion had indicated. Instead he leaned a little further back in the corner of the seat and lit a cigarette. "One needs to remember," he murmured, "that it is really quite a long time since I have seen this unwelcome intruder upon our privacy."